Summer in NYC. It’s hot, the Knicks won the championship(!), the World Cup is underway, I turned 40, and life at the moment is a big question mark. I seem to be at a life transition point with no obvious path. Growing up I don’t think I considered past this moment in time.

We returned from our 🇯🇵 Japan trip in mid-June. It was a bit of a whirlwind vacation, typical highs and lows, but I’m already looking back fondly and forgetting the lows. I engaged in a bit lot of Japanese retail therapy, and have no regrets. I’ve been itching to go back for a decade, and I guess I needed to get it all out of my system. We’re already talking about the next time we go, which I suspect will be a lot more chill. The question is: Hokkaido or Okinawa?

I’ve been considering since the start of this year that I might have to look for auxiliary income after that trip was over, but now on the other side I have very little motivation to do so. I like working on Pika and it feels like momentum. We just shipped The Pika Pulse, I finally finished Tables, and I’m about to get back into Custom Embeds (🤫 if you’re seeing this on Pulse).

But I did make two big life changes this month:

1. The wife and I got a personal trainer. It’s been almost two years since I worked out for real, and I’m huffing and puffing. Very out-of-shape at the moment. 🫠

2. I finally took the plunge and found a therapist. He specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and has some history with anxiety, stress, and mid-life crises. I’ve been ignoring advice and avoiding this step for a few decades now, so we’ll see how this goes…

My dog turns 5 at the end of August. My mom’s always done the thing where, when one dog gets old, she gets a second dog. It seems to help the old dog to have some youthful energy around. We’re wondering when we’d do that, though we’re not so keen on having two dogs in a Brooklyn apartment. So now that whole business is roped up in this wider question/debate of where we live. On top of that, we were at the beach a few weeks ago and a firework went off right above her head, and now she’s got a fear of loud noises. You can imagine how that’s been in NYC since. She’d quite prefer a quiet neighborhood with a large yard. Would we?

In my D&D campaign, the team have just fought and defeated the big bad. I took some great cues I found online from other DMs that have beefed up Nezznar, namely having him be loyal to the spider demon queen Lolth. This made for a very intense scene with the team surrounded as she and her spider horde arrived into the battle while they were near death’s door. They survived thanks to some deus ex machina storytelling, which has its upsides and downsides, but I was impressed with how they handled it.

The bigger news though: we all learned that one of the options in a wild magic surge is to have Reincarnate cast on you if you die within the next hour, and that’s how our gnome became an aasimar. The dice certainly tell a story.

I’ve had a list of potential blog post ideas gathering dust for months now, like the typeface of Japanese license plates, or how I noticed my ChatGPT starting to use the word “chaos goblin” a whole bunch across different contexts. Maybe I’ll get to those soon. Writing this right now I’m hoping might kickstart some blog posting? Maybe I’ll just stick to these long-form, stream of conscious “whats up with life recently” posts, though they do tend to attract many related tags…